The downside

Chambers has an elegant and thoroughly refined system for what happens when counsel cannot appear. The brief goes back, the clerks work the phones, someone else picks it up, and by the following morning the thing has been absorbed with a minimum of fuss. It is the product of several centuries of practice and it works beautifully.

For a day.

It has nothing at all to say about eighteen months. No sick pay arrives, because there is no employer to pay it. No death-in-service benefit sits behind you, because there is no scheme to sit in. The practice that took fifteen years to build is, from the point of view of everyone instructing you, a single person who is currently unavailable, and the market's memory is shorter than a long convalescence.

Which is why the detail of income protection matters more here than in almost any other profession. The definition of incapacity is the whole policy: an own-occupation definition asks whether you can do your job, while weaker definitions ask whether you can do any job at all, and for someone whose work is advocacy that difference is the entire point of the cover. Deferred periods need to be set against what your reserves can genuinely absorb rather than against what makes the premium look attractive. And a policy taken out at thirty-five and never looked at again is unlikely to reflect a practice that has quadrupled since.

The same absences shape everything else in this section. Parental leave at the self-employed Bar is a matter of savings and chambers' own policy rather than statutory entitlement, and the profession's record on it is not distinguished. Life cover written in trust sits outside the estate and pays without waiting for probate, which is a structural point rather than a product one.

None of this is cheerful. It is, however, the part of a financial plan that only matters on the worst day, which is a poor reason to leave it until later.